Well it's simple OP was a troll who wants to be banned so he can add another notch to his martyr wall. Some people attempted to engage as if he was not such a troll but actually wanted to have a discussion. After he proved to have in interest in said discussion Momsbb brought out Trollnir and banned his ass. The side conversations were between people who were just waiting for that last step.

(31-07-2014 04:37 PM)Luminon Wrote: America is full of guns, but they're useless, because nobody has the courage to shoot an IRS agent in self-defense

(23-03-2017 11:49 AM)natachan Wrote: ... But if you want to know, yes, I think millionaires and billionaires should be able to enjoy their wealth. I think that is important in order to encourage innovation and reward those who do innovate. The current list of richest people in the US includes innovators like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

I'd agree with you that people such as Gates and Zuckerberg have worked their arses off to get where they are, but I still think we need much higher tax rates for the billionaire class. Obviously an income tax of even 90% wouldn't affect these guys life-style by one iota—Gates' net worth is currently US$86.6 billion, and rising.

As far as higher tax rates acting as a disincentive against entrepreneurial input, I'm not sure that makes sense. It wasn't solely any potential financial return that drove Gates onward. And if he was only today worth US$8.6 billion (with 90% taxation), do you think—in hindsight—that would've slowed him down? Not one bit. Same with the 32-year-old Zuckerberg—who, incidentally, I consider to have added absolutely nothing of substance to the world, and is now worth $58.5 billion.

(And yes; I know my US$8.6 b estimate has to be very rubbery as far as compounding earnings with a tax of 90% goes. It's only illustrative.))

Quote:These men DESERVE their wealth, and I would not begrudge them it. They have improved my quality of life immensely, and I am happy for them.

Granted, they deserve some of their wealth, but do Gates and Zuckerberg "deserve" all of their obscene wealth. Wouldn't you agree that Xerox and IBM would have inevitably further developed the DOS/GUI interface assuming Gates and Jobs hadn't poached the technology? (Jobs "stole" the original mouse model from Doug Englebart at SRI.)

Can I ask how Mark Zuckerberg has improved your life "immensely"? And please don't cite the fermenting disaster that is Facebook.

One also has to remember that these sorts of guys get fabulously wealthy by taking your money and my money out of our pockets, continuously, for something often as nebulous as a 25¢ disk upgrade. In effect we, the buying public, have made them what they are today. Don't they owe the state/society something above and beyond as just return for that—like an increased taxation rate?

Off the top of my head, in outline, I see Microsoft's dominance on the desktop as holding back progress by probably a few decades when people were locked into their crappy but dominant OS. Conversely open source opened the floodgates of innovation.

The advantage Silicon Valley offers is the eco-system rather than the taxes. If taxes were the issue, they would be in Texas or some red state haven like Kansas instead of a liberal bastion like the Bay Area. Also some high tech companies like Nokia, Ericsson(they developed Erlang) are based in Scandinavia, not exactly a tax haven. This does not seem to have hindered them in any meaningful way from contributing to technology.

I also think monetary motivations work better for certain segments than others. Bill Gates would not be any more motivated, as you rightly observe, by the prospects of a few billion bucks more. But a middle-class person can be highly motivated by the promise of a bonus worth a few thousands. That could also work for a small business. For that reason, the idea that huge tax cuts for the superwealthy and huge corporations is the way to go seems like an overused cliche.

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning ~ Werner Heisenberg

Bill Gates doesn't know shit about public schools but still promotes his bullshit agenda.

Zuckerberg is a huge hypocrite talking about how Facebook is our medium of connectivity tapping into the bridges over walls thing and on his property in Hawaii he has a literal huge wall on what should be public land. And Facebook is shit. It's sad that such a shitty model is the one that caught on. I had to cancel it because the way it limits what you can do and how slow and cumbersome it is. It's about as fun as wearing a straight jacket.

(23-03-2017 03:33 PM)ImFred Wrote: Zuckerberg is a huge hypocrite talking about how Facebook is our medium of connectivity tapping into the bridges over walls thing and on his property in Hawaii he has a literal huge wall on what should be public land.

A few days after Christmas, Mark Zuckerberg shared a series of photographs of his family at their $100m, 700-acre property in Kauai. The Facebook CEO and his wife "fell in love with the community and the cloudy green mountains", he wrote, and decided to "plant roots and join the community ourselves"...

Two days later, Zuckerberg’s lawyers filed lawsuits against hundreds of Hawaiians who may own an interest in small parcels within the boundaries of Zuckerberg’s estate...

Zuckerberg’s lawsuits have prompted a backlash from locals who place the billionaire within a long, painful history of western conquest and Native Hawaiian dispossession...

"Zuckerberg is saying he wants to respect the local culture and Hawaiian values but … I was always taught that if there was a dispute with somebody you go and knock on their door, sit down, and you kukakuka [discuss] and you hooponopono [make it right]," said Hawaii state representative Kaniela Ing of Maui. "You don’t initiate conversation by filing a lawsuit"...

"This is the face of neocolonialism," said Kapua Sproat, a law professor at the University of Hawaii who is originally from Kauai.

—The Guardian, Australia, 23 Jan 2017

Quote:And Facebook is shit.

I've never had a Facebook page, and never will. My brother, his wife, and couple of other relatives have recently closed their accounts. Their main reason was that Facebook is worthless as any sort of meaningful communication tool, and nobody is really interested in their new kitchen cupboards, or their dog's summer haircut, or how dry the weather's been lately. It's fast becoming a medium for spammers and scammers, or just a clumsy, glorified photo album.

During the Obama administration the highest bracket rate went from 35% to 39.6%

The late 80’s and early 90’s are a bonanza to the American taxpayer with the highest rate at only 28%
But this causes the deficit to take off for obvious reasons.
Check out 1986, 15 tax brackets topping out at 50%
1981 top tax rate 70%!
1978 had 26 tax brackets, the highest one also 70%
1964 highest tax bracket 77%!
1963 highest tax bracket 91%!!
1944 highest tax bracket 94%

In the last 30 years taxes on the highest earners has plummeted by more than half. I can’t imagine this not contributing to our spiraling deficit.

This is a very telling table.
On the one hand the bottom 50% of income earners pay a combined 2.8% of ALL federal taxes.
The top 10% of all income earners pay 69.8% and
The top 1% pay 37.8% of all Federal taxes.

And here one can really see how the income brackets play out even within the top 1%. He uses 10,000 people and breaks them down by income. You can see that the top 1000 make as much as the next 9000!

I would support having the top end of the brackets gradually go back to 70%.
I don’t think we need 26 tax brackets like we had in 1964 but a higher progressive tax would go along way in redistributing wealth and bringing down the deficit so we can afford Sesame Street, the Arts, Scientific research, NOAA, the Coast Guard, Meals on Wheels etc.

After all, all of us, especially those at the very top, benefit form a stable, capitalistic society. If the populace can’t afford your goods, get a decent education, make ends meet, have a working infrastructure and enjoy affordable healthcare then society breaks down and everyone loses. Don’t look now but we’re headed that way.

I am a capitalist, but I’m also a realist and pragmatist. There needs to be financial incentive to create, innovate and take risks but there also needs to be social stability to enjoy the spoils and give future generations the advantage of all the things I listed above.

"A highly complex set of laws and exemptions from laws and taxes has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth. Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.”http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/pow...nager.html

ps grammar, spelling changes

“I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s.”~Mark Twain
“Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.”~ Ambrose Bierce